Top Flickr photos of 2016

For the Top 25 photos on Flickr in 2016, the site sorted through billions of uploads to arrive at these 25 favorites. They winners constitute a small selection of the beautiful corpus at Flickr, and they celebrate some of the best qualities of the people who find their inspiration on Flickr.

To compile this list, Flickr started with an algorithm that calculates a combination of social and engagement metrics, such as how often the photo had been “faved” and viewed. To avoid results that merely reflect a popularity contest, the selection also involved curation by Flickr staff.

When photos from the same community member appeared multiple times in the algorithmic ranking, Flickr selected one of the photographer’s top-scoring images to represent the person’s work. Some of the top photos are from institutional accounts, such as the White House, which is one of the most followed accounts on Flickr, but most are from individuals with an eye for beauty, whether in remote natural settings or in dense urban centers.